Iran blamed for recent DDoS attacks on Capital One, SunTrust, and Regions Financial
A continuing series of attacks against major U.S. banking websites added three more to the list of victims last week. Capital One, SunTrust, and Regions Financial became part of the ever growing list of Wall Street financial institutions who have encountered the distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against their websites. Earlier this year, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo were hit by the attacks which caused significant disruptions.
Despite the scale of the DDoS attacks, no customer data has been compromised. Still, some customers criticize the banks for their failure to restore their websites in a timely fashion. The question still remains, though; who was responsible? Many are pointing the finger at Iran.
A hactivist group known as the Cyber Fighters of Izz ad-din Alr qassam has stepped forward to take credit for the attacks. They claim the attacks were meant to protest the controversial “Innocence of Muslims” film which appears to mock the founder of Islam. However, inaccuracies in the group’s statements have led others to continue the search.
U.S. government officials have recently stated that they were able to trace the attacks back to a small group of Iranian information security specialists. The group of fewer than 100 is based in Iranian universities and technology companies. It is unclear whether the Iranian government was backing the group, but U.S. officials emphasize that the group had some form of substantial backing.
Original article by Mathew J. Schwartz.
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